short and insightful writing about a long and complex history

Lessons of the Narcotic Farm, Part Four: The Literature of Lexington

Editor’s Note: Today, Points returns to Lexington once more, for another revisiting of the narcotic farm experience. Luke Walden gives an overview of the memoirs and other literary accounts of the institution, written by various addict-prisoner-patients over the years. Aspects of this literature will be well familiar to readers with more than a passing interest in prison literature more generally, though the ever-present addiction concept lends these accounts their own distinctive quality. For those of you new to this series, Luke authored Part One of the series, which offered a really useful overview. JP Olsen’s Part Two reflected on their interview subjects and their subject’s young, Lexington-era selves. Nancy’s Campbell’s Part Three (itself in a first and second part) covered women’s experiences at Lexington.

The U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, KY was iconic of American drug culture from its opening in 1935 to its closing in 1975. Several literary accounts by former patients provide an intimate and richly detailed understanding of this often-enigmatic icon. Although these authors surely employed some poetic license, the general historical accuracy of this literature and its value in understanding the Lexington patient experience are confirmed by extensive interviews that JP Olsen and I conducted with former Lexington patients for our documentary film, The Narcotic Farm.

William S. Burroughs’ 1953 memoir-as-novel, Junky, published under the nom de plume of William Lee, first detailed what was becoming a rite of passage among young addicts in the post-war heroin epidemic — “taking the cure” at ‘Lex’, or ‘K.Y.’ which Burroughs did in 1946. Junky established important themes in the narrative of Lexington: the lack of genuine interest in quitting drugs that most patients at Lexington displayed, their general contempt for staff efforts to help them and their devious techniques to get what they wanted. Burroughs also carefully captured the junkie argot that was a constant buzz at Lexington, for example ‘croaker’ [doctor], ‘hack’ [guard], ‘on the nod’, even the term ‘junkie’ itself. Lexington patients were, as Burroughs put it, “like hungry men who can talk about nothing but food.”

Burroughs himself was so hungry that he never made it out of the Shooting Gallery (the detox ward) into Narco’s general population. Dope sickness after his last methadone shot drove him to check out two days later, an extremely common pattern among volunteer admissions to the institution, often called “winders” because they wound their way in and out of the facility again and again. But despite his short stay the place made an impression on him.Years later he penned a disdainful prose poem entitled The Do-Rights about sycophantic junkies at Lexington who manipulated doctors into giving them larger doses of methadone.

Like Father, Like Son

Burroughs’ loathing for authority was shared by many who wrote about their time at Lexington, including his own son, William S. Burroughs, Jr. In his 1973 autobiographical novel, Kentucky Ham, he describes how his father dropped him off there (in 1966 or 1967) for a “cure” mandated by a Florida court as part of a four-year probation. Burroughs, Jr. as narrator was extremely critical of group therapy at Lexington, which happened only once or twice a week and was led by “some fuzzy-cheeked little shrimp who’d never seen a junkie before he arrived” with such insights as, “we have found that many of you began taking drugs because…you want to be ‘cool’, you want to be ‘hip’, you want to be ‘in’.” Burroughs had no patience for doctors who wouldn’t let go of the simplistic idea that drug naïve youth have to be led astray, “by older kids, by Communist pederast pushers, somebody. It never occurs to them that some people burst from the folds with shrieks of joy….Fact remains, most of us love it out here. Wish you were with us.”

Burroughs, Jr. hit on a profound truth about the failure of treatment at Lexington—it was a top down affair in which “square” doctors alienated most of their patients, many of whom didn’t really want to quit drugs anyway. The persistence of this dynamic finally led in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the adoption of addict-run Therapeutic Communities on campus, an approach which seemed successful in similar programs such Synanon in Santa Monica and Daytop Village in New York. It didn’t end well at Lexington, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Though a speed freak on the outside, in Kentucky Ham Burroughs, Jr. describes quickly making a steady connection for Dilaudid at Lex. This willingness to use any available substance to get high was common. As our documentary interview subject Bernie Kolb said, “On the outside I hated speed, but at Lexington I bought it, just to change what was going on in my head.” Former patient John Stallone described inmates fermenting “pruno” in toilets and trying to drink the contents of fire extinguishers. Burroughs’s describes inmates stealing mace and nutmeg from the prison kitchen and himself trying a fad that swept the prison, smoking dried banana peels. Anything to change what was going on in his head.

What fills the head of the protagonist of Clarence Cooper’s brilliant experimental novel, The Farm, is not just contraband mace, which he gets off on regularly, but also lust. Set entirely inside the institution, The Farm is the longest and richest literary characterization of the place and the only one written by an African-American. Cooper “combs the nappy hair of memory” well and vividly captures the palpable longing between male and female patients who, for part of the institution’s history, were separated only by locked gates in the hallways and a courtyard between wings of the main complex. His narrator, John, describes “5neat longrows of women, a dynamite splash of colors all trousered tightly, looking at us, we3hundred craning necks, in the same way we watched them.” About the guards he says, “You could tell they enjoyed seeing us separated this way. A kind of animal control.” He characterizes Lexington’s staff as inept or corrupt authority figures who existed to be resisted but he also sees them as potential assets to be exploited in his quest for contact with “his” woman in “the Ginny Barn,” or women’s ward.

The tantalizing proximity of the women’s ward to the male inmate population gave rise to a constant stream of “kites,” or illicit notes, and incessant “finger writing,” a simple form of alphabetic sign language common in many prisons. Cooper and all of our interview subjects described the courtship ritual of male and female inmates thrusting their hands though tiny windows to “write” to potential mates across the courtyard, often without even seeing their faces. Patients also went to great lengths to get close to the opposite sex. Stan Novick, one of our interview subjects, remembered that many gentiles professed to be Jewish because men and women could sit side by side in Jewish religious services. In The Farm Cooper’s character joins special Addicts Anonymous meetings solely because they provide an opportunity to touch his girlfriend, Sonja. And the climax of his story finds John successfully blackmailing a guard for access to an unused stairwell where they can finally have sex.

As our interview subject and former Lex patient Eddie Flowers told us, “The thing about addicts is they can come up with some shit, you hear me? I mean if there was a need to find a way, we found it.” He told us about striking deals with a long-term patient called “Babs the keymaker,” who several times let him into an unpopulated section of the prison for trysts with his girlfriend, Dolores. Former farm administrator Robert Maclin even described male inmates practicing like acrobats to form human pyramids in the courtyard. When the “hacks” weren’t looking, they would take turns climbing up the pyramid to a low roof outside the barred windows of the Jenny Barn in hopes of receiving what an abashed Maclin described as “you know, what president Clinton got.” This inventive and energetic drive to attain the object of desire regardless of all obstacles is both metaphoric for the addict’s drive to score and also a manifestation of what psychologist and former Lexington patient Dr. David Deitch meant when he told us “there is in the spirit of all human beings the resistance against being controlled.”

Mess Hall, Junkie Fraternity

Quarantining large numbers of recalcitrant addicts in one institution had the unintended consequence of solidifying addicts’ identification as junkies and perpetuating junkie culture. As Alexander King, a former art editor of Life and Vanity Fair who went to Lexington four times, observed in his bestselling 1958 memoir Mine Enemy Grows Older, “When a young delinquent lands at the hospital he is greeted by a few hundred new connections and a couple of hundred old magicians, soothsayers, and alchemists.” King had little respect for the treatment offered by Lexington’s staff, least of all an enthusiastic occupational therapist who tried to teach him to knit using “horrific colors” while he was still dope sick and feverish. In May this House Be Safe from Tigers(1960), King opines that even if a patient wanted to

…And Knitting

stay straight, “The best the croakers and prison authorities down there can do for you is to stop you from using junk while you’re inside the walls of the institution. Once you hit the street you’re strictly on your own, and the tide of crap that engulfed you and sent you sprawling is again waiting for you right there on your doorstep.”

This failure of Narco to permanently cure the vast majority of its patients is the cornerstone of the narrative in Otto Preminger’s 1955 film adaptation of Nelson Algren’s book The Man with the Golden Arm. The film opens with Frank Sinatra’s character, Frankie Machine, stepping off a bus from Lexington, a trip which serves as a concise signifier of his identity as a junkie (as does Al Pacino’s character Bobby’s boast early in the 1971 film Panic in Needle Park that he’s “been to K.Y. twice”). Back home in Chicago, Frankie extols the virtues of Lexington to his barfly buddies. He confides his ambition to become a jazz drummer but ruefully acknowledges that his doctor at Lex told him, “If I take even one fix, I’m hooked again.” This setup is a key source of dramatic tension in the story, though the outcome is, of course, inevitable.

In the Narcotic Farm of story and screen, addicts manipulate doctors they don’t respect and resist guards they resent. They then go home with nothing to support their sobriety but good intentions, if that. Like more than 90% of all patients who passed through Lexington, they don’t stand a chance. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from the literature of Lexington, it is that pouring federal money into a giant building out in the country staffed with employees whose dual mission is a cross between being a high school guidance counselor and a detention monitor is doomed to fail at long-term rehabilitation. It’s something to remember as we question our vast prison industry today.

I’ll conclude with a recent song by my filmmaking partner, JP Olsen’s rock band, The Malefactors of Great Wealth. The song, Prisontown, is itself a kind of institutional critique of the prison economy. But it is also just a good rock and roll song, and the music video features footage from a rock concert at Lexington during the wild and wooly days in the late 60s and early 70s when the bars came down and the patients were practically running the show. Looks like a manifestation of the resistance against control.

One thought on “Lessons of the Narcotic Farm, Part Four: The Literature of Lexington”

I happened to be at KY reviewing their TC program for the State of New Jersey on the day that President Nixon announced to the press that they were converting KY back to a prison. I commented to the counselor qua guard who was showing me around that it was a shame they had to put up new bars so soon after they had taken them down. With a huge grin, he told me it wouldn’t be that bad — they had saved the old ones!